If you want to see rail developed as a viable part of our transportation system, then you should join the National Corridors Initiative.

That is our name for our attempt to organize, advocate, create, design, and help to build interstate rail corridors that are fashioned to sustain themselves economically. It is also our attempt to make sure that the regions know about each others successes and failures, triumphs and struggles -- so that each one doesnt have to invent the wheel that the other has built.

It is also our name for the growing number of academics, legislators, businessmen, financiers and environmentalists who have joined with us over the past decade, and who are leading the charge. These are advocates of their own regional/intercity corridors, whose success and ultimate interconnection will create the national corridors system we have been espousing. NCI advocates the creation of a cost-effective rail passenger operation free of Federal operating subsidy, by removing the barriers to capital formation needed for right-of-way construction, and by earning state support for improved regional rail service. We seek to do this not just for passenger rail, but to expand freight capacity as well, on the theory that improved freight and passenger capacity increases throughput and thus lowers all transportation costs, which in turn cuts the cost of living for all of us. Much work remains to be done to make this possible. But the groundwork has been laid.

We need your help to win.

We have been working for more than a decade on behalf of this cause, but there are still many skeptics.

You can help us, and help your own region, by giving a national voice to the rail corridors movement, by signing up -- individual memberships are only $45.00 (USD) a year -- and by attending our conferences.

For over 20 years the National Corridors Initiative has been at the forefront of a battle unknown to most. As we related above, beginning in the Northeast, we reversed a long-standing Administration policy against rail investment in the Northeast, and have now spread our story nationally -- and built bridges between scores of people who otherwise might have labored on
alone.

The breakthrough some of us have been working towards for a decade, twenty years, or more, is at hand. We have indeed been to the mountaintop -- and by God, we DO want to cross over. Now is the time to create the groundswell that will overwhelm our opponents, especially the narrow interests who would restrict Federal funding for intercity rail, as it has in the past, to the point of absurdity.

We need you to join us.

As this is the first step in taking the National Corridors Initiative and the National Corridors movement over the top, we ask you to sign up as individual members of NCI, at a cost of $45.00 (USD) by check and payable to the NORTHEAST CORRIDOR INITIATIVE (our original name), CT Office, 8 Riverbend Drive, Mystic, CT, 06355. In doing so, you will support the following:

The work of NCI in spreading the word among regional advocates -- and to the national news media, which is at last beginning to listen -- that they, and you, are not alone, and that there is a growing national base of support for rail. You, by joining, will become a member of that all-important base.

The National Corridors Institute - established in 1999 after a decade of ground-laying advocacy by NCI, the National Corridors Institute will publish peer-reviewed scholarly articles and information bulletins about the social, economic, and environmental benefits of investing in passenger rail, and distribute those findings to the national news media in an effort to counter the active disinformation campaign of rails implacable opponents.

Discounts on attendance at National Corridors conferences. It is expensive to mount successful conferences, but it is also expensive for individuals to attend them unless they are backed by large organizations. NCI will offer a minimum $50 discount to its own individual members, for any conferences it holds. NCIs conferences are regarded as the strongest, most substantial of any rail organization, because they attract the very best of the industry. We will send you a summary of past conferences when you join.

E-mail communications of important developments and news that affect the advocacy movement.